With obesity rates in an all time high in the US and on the rise in other Western countries, everyone is looking for the fastest, easiest way to drop excess weight.

Thanks to this interest in weight loss, the news is filled with stories of dieting tips, magazines have nearly cover to cover stories on one diet trick or another, and every other commercial you see seems to be hocking some kind of weight loss magic bullet.

Through all of this coverage of diets, a lot of words get tossed around without any real explanation.

Case in point: metabolism. Your metabolism is crucial to the success of any weight loss plan, and many diet aids claims to be able to “speed up” your metabolism. But before you go out and hand over your hard earned money for metabolism boosting pills, you should learn exactly what it is, how it is related to weight loss and how to rev it up (if you can).

Metabolism is tied to maintaining weight, but it is much more than that. In a very general sense, metabolism is what keeps you alive. Metabolism is actually a series of chemical processes that occur in your body that regulate cellular respiration, digestion, cellular growth and repair and so on. Nearly every automatic process that happens in your body is controlled by your metabolism – including the burning of food for energy and the storage of energy as fat.

Your metabolism is the basis for an important number in weight loss – your basal metabolic rate, or BMR. Your BMR is the number of calories (which are simply a measure of energy in food) that you burn when you are resting. In other words, it is the number of calories you would burn just to keep your body alive, if you chose to sit very still all day and not move. This number is then the base number of calories your body needs to maintain itself – consuming less of than this number of calories will cause your body to turn to stored energy, i.e. fat, to get the energy it needs to function, causing you to lose weight.

When people talk about increasing metabolism, it is this BMR number they want to increase. BMR can be increased through a few different methods, although maintaining the increase over the long term can be difficult. To boost metabolism, aerobic exercise is needed, as is exercise to increase lean muscle mass. The factors that reduce BMR are many – age, stress, large meals, and extremes in temperature, certain medications and so on. There are also medical conditions that can significantly decrease your BMR, such as hypothyroidism (under-active thyroid), problems with the hypothalamus and parathyroid, and a range of autoimmune and endocrine disorders.

Many people want to know their BMR so they can develop an effective weight loss program. A precise measurement of BMR is an elaborate affair that needs to be performed by a doctor or someone else with medical training under the watch of a doctor. You can, however, get a general idea of your BMR using BMR calculators that you can find online. These ask you to enter your height, weight, age and so on and give you a ballpark figure for your BMR rate. It is important to note here that all bets are off if you have a condition that impacts your metabolism – these calculators are next to useless for you.

So, what about diet pills that claim to rev up your metabolism? The medical community believes that this is not possible with the medications available. These pills give you a little boost of energy, that could in turn spur you to exercise, which would boost your metabolism, but that is it. Equally effective and much safer would be to skip straight to the exercise.